Borderline Art Space, art gallery in Iași, presents an exhibition of drawing, poetry and video entitled "Forest Creatures", by artist Laura Partin, opened on April 12. Curated by Simona Vilău, the exhibition can still be viewed by phone reservation until May 11, 2023.

Performers Alice Monica Marinescu, Cabiria Morgenstern and cameramen Mihai Florea, Marcel Trifan were involved in the project, and the music was provided by Fetter (Jessica Tucker, new media artist and musician).

"Being a project both lived and imagined, Forest Creatures includes works of drawing, poetry and video, apparently incompatible. The correlation came naturally during the work. Trained as a graphic artist in Iași, in a school with respect for drawing, Laura Partin feels the need to perfect herself, to expand her area of interest for mediums and to always experiment with other ways of creating", we learn from Simona Vilău.

"The artist relies on the difference between the work in the workshop and its intimacy and the finished work, the exhibition, the message. She also relies on the complementary forces that arise from the text and from working with the camera, two other mediums she used in the realization of this project.

How many Laura Partins do we meet in this exhibition? At least four, projected into a room of mirrors. The pandemic helped her reformulate her goals and propose the same theme treated with the help of four different mediums: drawing with illustrative, magical-poetic notes, the video-performance with an ecological theme, the feminist poetry already contained in a volume published by The frACTalia publishing house and the theoretical work on the project, with explanatory notations and autobiographical references.

The creatures of the forest are a metaphor for transformation and suffering. The fear behind the suffering is immortalized in the portraits of innocent little girls, each lost in her own fairy tale world, populated by insects, fabulous characters and an apparent hardening of the self.

The ecological theme completes the experience and translates it into a worrying present, of global warming and climate change. Being aware of it or not, humanity has recently gone through at least three major episodes of humanitarian crisis, mediatized and experienced in an oversaturated digital collective", pointed out the curator.

Laura Partin is a contemporary artist born in Iasi, now living in Bucharest, who explores drawing techniques such as pencil on paper, watercolor and Chinese ink on canvas, but also uses performance (sometimes participatory), installation or video art. She studied Fine Arts, Art History and Theory at "George Enescu" National University of Arts in Iași, and between 2012-2014 she had a scholarship in Fine Arts at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice. In 2021, she obtained a PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Paris. Over the years, Laura has tackled topics such as gender stereotypes, the condition of migrant workers and concepts from social psychology such as cognitive dissonance or terror management theory. Her most recent project, Sfratto/Eviction (2020), exhibited in Rome, incorporated a video and a series of drawings about the eviction of Roma families from their homes in Romania between 2010 and 2020. Most recently, in the context of the pandemic, she became interested in the multimedia/performative potential of contemporary feminist poetry and time spent in nature as a form of introspective healing.

The exhibition is organized by Borderline Art Space through the AltIași Cultural Association and is part of the "Post-Human Escapes" project, co-financed by AFCN.